is this series overdue for movie and who would star?

I think Jason Behr would be very good in this role. Would love to see a remake no matter who stars.

I think this series is ready for a remake with a whole new treatment of the character and circumstances. The immortality angle was an interesting and certainly original premise for television in it's day -even if the show did play out like a version of "The Fugitive." I wasn't fortunate enough to see it originally, I was around 5 or so, but caught it later when Sci-Fi reran it and "The Invaders" and a few other series.

I can't quite see it as a movie(maybe as a series premiere), it's episodic material by nature, you have a villain, villains, or villainous organization pursuing an individual. By it's very nature it forces the viewer to identify with the main character, sympathize, and plays on the part of us all that knows that no matter how many of us may group together in whatever social structures throughout our lives, ultimately all beings are alone in our existence at death... As viewers we all experience mortality, but still relate to this immortal due to his poor treatment at the hand of others and his "aloneness" at being cut apart from the social groups we take for granted despite his having the one thing we do not.

My suggestion is that the character be re-imagined, but with an homage to the original series. Start out with the original premise of a race car driver who gets discovered/revealed as an immortal, but then run with it... Through a movie, or even an entire series we find out that he knows he is an immortal through flashback episodes to earlier periods in history and other settings. We find out that he has a regenerative factor that ultimately may keep him alive and heal him despite whatever may happen to him -and has for eons as long as a certain % of his cellular brain mass and DNA survives and can be nourished to grow again. Perhaps his "cellular memory" of past lives is only restored a bit at a time as his body is regenerated -flashbacks are triggered by the current storyline. Perhaps we meet another of his group or fellows who has reached the end of his tether for whatever reasons and needs him to survive and becomes the villain of the piece. Perhaps our hero starts out as a young immortal and becomes the villain preying on another later young "immortal"... or decides immortality is not worth that price. Imagine the pathos of being eternally young in a world of the constantly aging and having to masquerade or pull up roots every twenty years or so... Perhaps we even experience desperate attempts at preserving a love beyond her years or more poignant attempts at normalcy. How about other immortals who have moved through the fabric of history as various men or women of stature in science, politics, or revolution? The possibilities are endless.

Want to save a buck in production while maintaining the tapestry of multiple time periods? Set it in the future and have many flashbacks to contemporary periods of history. Better yet, get the rights and use those old episodes of the original series to weave into the fabric -different character, maybe our main character sometimes regenerates with different features ala Doctor Who... or remembers another of his kind he has met.

Perhaps the overall arc of the story becomes his search for normalcy, maybe even mortality, or even that he somehow eventually "curses" all of humanity with his "gift" -possibly by giving up his own immortality. Perhaps in a truly perverse twist all of humanity ends up seeking the mortality that the immortal now has.

If they're going to do a big budget film, I prefer that the film is of the original novel and not the TV show. The TV show was a great failure, as was the TV movie pilot.